Friday, December 23, 2011

Bodhi Linux 1.3.0 Releases

All of our Bodhi users have been good little boys and girls this year it seems! So good in fact we are giving you your present a day early. The Bodhi team and I are happy to announce our next update release - Bodhi 1.3.0. While you will not find any earth shattering new features in this release there are many minor improvements.

Most notably you will find the use of the new "itask" module in three of our profiles, it is far more flexible than our old taskbar module. Also worth noting is that our installer slide show has gotten a much needed make over, along with further updates to our on disc documentation and a pretty new installer icon:

Software wise you will find a fresh Enlightenment desktop built from SVN this week and the Midori 0.4.2 web browser. In terms of themes this release features Agust, BlingBlack, PinkBodhi and Sunshine.

You can find our high speed torrent download here or the slower direct download here. As this is just a minor release current Bodhi users can easily update their systems to these packages following the directions here (it is recommend you do a full reboot or at least X restart after these updates).

In other Bodhi related news I have been hacking happily away at Bodhi for ARM. Beyond our Genesi partner hardware I have been working at getting file systems prepared for the Nokia N900 and the HP TouchPad running Bodhi's enlightenment desktop. These file systems will be based on Debian Wheezy (The current squeeze release lacks enough ARM support to be used).

Thanks for the release, just upgraded from 1.1 and everything went off smooth. Sunshine theme is not installable, when i clicked Download it said file not found and when i right clicked and did save as, it downloaded but while installing said it's not in right deb archive format.

Had another question though, is there a debian base E17 in the works? I know the current 10.04 is LTS and quite stable but raw debian base always is lighter. Ubuntu for all the good work they're doing to bring Linux to the masses tend to add things which make the OS feel bloated and resource intensive.

If i or for that matter any user were to do a base/minimum Debian install, is there a Bodhi how-to/guide that can help in adding onto the base Debian to get the remaining Bodhi system?

If it's too much of an ask :-) then it's fine, i'll try to hunt and build if i get the time and resource.

@Murall Thanks for the report about the sunshine theme page - it was simply a bad link that is now corrected. Apt-get updating never adds new "default" art to a system, thus why I link to the themes.

A Debian base for the desktop is not planned. Really we just don't stand to gain anything from it. All that bloat you talk about Ubuntu having is not installed in Bodhi by default (we strip it out), sure you could reinstall it - but then you could also install that same bloat on top of Debian.

Jeff - Thanks for the lightning quick reply (like E-17 :-) ). No worries on the bad link, just thought of informing, will try installing again.

That's reassuring to know Bodhi doesn't have unwanted features like in Ubuntu, so my question is moot, fine with what we've in Bodhi then :-). Any plans for latest Kernels aka 3.1.x? apt-cache only has upto 3.0.0.14.

I'm facing some E17 related issues after upgrade and reboot, not sure if i should raise it here, if there's a forum/bug page for it. Can you please let me know where i can raise it?

Any issues you encounter (or bugs to report) I would request you post at our users forums.

With regards to the kernel, our builds directly follow upstream Ubuntu releases. This means once 12.04 has a kernel build based on a stable 3.2 kernel source we will move to that. In fact you can find an RC build of the 3.2 knerel in our testing repository now.

I am glad you are not getting mixed up with the Debian base like Mint did with LMDE, which doesn't have many followers. If not for the Ubuntu base, Mint would not be this popular. Even though, there are no statistics, I believe Bodhi had come a long way and has a serious users, yes, very satisfied users. Wish you many successes!Merry Christmas and Very Happy New Year!

Thanks a lot Jeff! Been using Bodhi since 1.0 and all I can say is that I love it! You have brought E17 to the people and it is now my favorite WM. Hopefully in the next year Bodhi and E17 can move on to much greater heights.Happy hols!

Dear Jeff, I'm a bodhi user from Salta, Argentina. My name is Francisco and I'm a Linux user since 2008. Since then i've tried a lot of distros, most of them Ubuntu based, but also Fedora, OpenSuse, and many others... I remember the first time I met Bodhi, It was love at first sight!!! But in that moment, I had some hardware issues on my netbook, so I left it and return to ubuntu... But with the 1.2 release everything works so fine and my machine works faster and solid than ever... Now I,ve just upgrade to 1.3... Thanks to you and to all the Bodhi team for the hard work. Iĺl keep spreading the voice about this great OS, I have in mind start writing a Blog to spread Bodhi into more spanish users. Merry Christmas and sorry for my english!!!

I seem to have a lot of bugs with Bodhi... Seems Enlightenment related. But nevertheless, great system. Not something I'm ready to use full time but a beautiful and straight forward OS that a Linux beginner could easily pick up and use... Keep the advancements up team, your doing a very nice job.

I would use it but I find the configuration tools far too complicated... have the font sizes been increased? I don't want to squint all the time and I don't even wear glasses!

Does this contain a new version of E17? Last time I tried it in Bodhi 1.2.0 it was just far too buggy for my tastes. It's good though but it's good a long way to go to being my #1 choice and I don't really care for configuration. That's why I like Bodhi--it comes with a bunch of nice themes!

But has the font size been increased? I can't stand how small everything is. Also, is there a way to get desktop icons? I don't really fancy using the dock and when I try to customise it I get seriously confused (making the dock transparent to get desktop icons? lol?).

Great work Jeff, I haven't been to the site in a while and didn't even see a new release was out until today! I'm very excited and thrilled. You're continued support and work is both appreciated and now a necessity for my daily life! Cheers to you this holiday season. Don't know what we'd do without you!!

I recall flippin' X crashing several times, especially with a Qt program. There was something I pressed in Midori that did this everytime, but I can't remember as this quite a few months ago. Anyway, I shan't put myself through the same crap just to report a bug, I'm not one to use broken software...

The problem with the font was that there were several configurations for it, and you've got to find them separately if I recall correctly... for instance some of them were under Theme I think, but others were program-specific? Really confusing, I think it's a bit too customisable for its own good. And lastly, the theme customisation (borders, etc) is absolutely awful. The list on the left has confusing names straight out of a text file. Openbox and Kwin do this a whole lot better. But I don't really mind about this anyway. It's the bugs that eventually drove me away.

Aside from these complaints, there are some excellent things about E17 (lol, it sounds like some drug) such as how the mouse is immediately drawn to prompts which I thought was *really* cool and its nice effects--and naturally, being so light on resources while being *that* good looking. They EFL people should really focus on making it a full-blown DE rather than just a window manager, miss my desktop icons (major complaint)! It has its own libraries after all and pulling in dependencies tends to suck.

I assume you're an EFL developer, right? You can make the difference! But first fix the appearance of Qt apps... I assume it's distro-specific and if you could integrate them more I could probably move back to Bodhi. I did enjoy it but it was no Xubuntu-customised Xfce or KDE (generally speaking). :)

Great Work! Recently switched to Sabayon (partly because I couldn't make e17 quit crashing (mainly me messing with it...), partly because I'm masochistic.) but I'll definitely have to download this and have a look! e17 is definitely the best WM that I've used, and any distro that has releases for it automatically gets bookmarked by me for future use.

There is a fine line between bleeding and stable, and Bodhi manages to stradle that line quite nicely.

And please include good default themes for gtk and qt! both looked quite... off, never a big enough deal for me to bother fixing, but I'm sure someone else will care.

Recent update fixed a problem with my laptop. Thanks. If I closed the lid the internet connection would be "gone" ; I had to work around to restore it. Now I can close the lid and not be forced to shutdown to prevent connection problem.

Search Blog

About Me

My name is Jeff Hoogland and you've landed on one of my Google pages. I currently work as adjunct faculty teaching mathematics at ITT Technical Institute in Springfield IL. I am a free software advocate and part time code jockey. You can learn more about me from my personal website.

Contact

About this Website

Thoughts on Technology is a collection of my own original writings about computers, hardware, software, and all forms of technology in the world around us today. I ask that you please do not repost my works without permission, but if you wish to please feel free to link back to my website here.

Donate

If you would like to support my projects with a financial donation you can do so via the button below.